Reinstallation.

Life I used to become quite emotional when my computers stopped working -- this goes back to the nineties when I was still using Windows 3.1; there'd be some virus or the blue screen of death would appear and I'd, well, not be emotional exactly, but I would panic, "No, no, no!" I'd shout, mostly because although I know how to use computers, I don't know that much about them and I knew it would be some time before it could be repaired.

This afternoon, at about the time I was musing on what to do with the evening, my PC switched from the article I was reading to that blue screen. I was installing some viewing software for an old freeview dongle I'd been wanted to see working again and from what I can gather it deleted something called an SQL server then neglected to replace it with anything and so Windows became confused and shut down.

Successive restarts just resulted in some other problem or other. I attempted to repair the installation but the same thing happened. I tried to return the machine to an earlier state using a recovery disc but it asked me for an administrator password which I couldn't remember. So I sighed and began to reinstall Windows from scratch.

But at no point did I panic. I'm positively sanguine. I've lost all of the emails in my inbox and the address book, an archive stretching back to 2001. I've lost the files which make up the archive of playlists I've downloaded in Spotify (a sizeable chunk of my monthly broadband allowance over successive months). Nevertheless, I just sighed through each successive setback and solution.

Somewhere along the line, at point I can't quite define, I've gone from computers and this computer being the be all and end all to - it's not the end of the world if it breaks. I've even come to the conclusion that it's good to start from scratch once in a while to pull back to the essentials. Does this mean I've finally grown up or simply developed some perspective?

Or is it just far easier now to get computers working again?